This commentary is by Steve Deal, who is a retired naval officer living in Franklin County. He previously served as deputy chief learning officer for the Department of the Navy.
Earlier this year, in a quiet decision no cable news network will cover, a small Swanton church issued a bulletin in which it said, “The steering committee for Saint Mary’s Academy regretfully announces that we are putting plans for a Catholic school in Franklin County on hold.” The committee blamed no one and merely referred to bankruptcy proceedings regarding the Burlington Diocese.
But they are far from alone. A growing host of Vermonters are reconsidering the virtuous formation of their children amidst state-directed reformulations for education. And thanks to supporters of Mid-Vermont Christian Academy, a separate case may reach the Supreme Court to address Vermont’s newest educational statute.
Vermont’s Act 73 effectively ends public tuition support for most independent and religious schools. Existing students are grandfathered, but future access looks bleak. For many independent schools, particularly faith-based ones, this amounts to a slow defunding by design.
Yet most of the current debate around Act 73 has been territorial and legalistic. Will a town lose its school? Which districts will survive? Who controls the map?
Certainly, those questions matter. But the most important one might be the one yet unasked: What is education for?
We measure educational success by scores, rankings and funding formulas. We emphasize workplace readiness and procedural inclusion, not whether education produces citizens capable of understanding, exercising and protecting their hard-won freedoms.
Education was meant to form a free people, able to govern themselves and their communities. Vermont’s constitution, as ever, puts it bluntly:
“That frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep government free.”
Does the education of such principles, otherwise known as virtues, just happen? Schools were not only created to transmit skills, but to cultivate character. The founders assumed moral education was the core of citizenship. We have inverted that hierarchy.
Somehow, the education of morality became a completely private matter, and public schools are treated as neutral delivery systems for skills, credentials and opportunity.
No, the law cannot teach morality, and our founders never assumed it would. But such neutrality, cloaked in nihilism, is impossible for freedom’s defense. When our children look up from their phones — where conflicts rage across every screen — and ask what we are defending, do we have an answer?
Every education conveys a vision of what it means to be human. Our current approach reflects one view: that knowledge is procedural, virtue is relative, and the highest civic good is inclusion rather than critical thinking — or what earlier ages dared to call wisdom.
But Vermont has long benefited from better collaboration. Town public schools and parish or independent schools, private and public universities alike, offered different emphases, while their graduates met and led in the same workplaces and town halls.
The great conversation between secular civic reason and moral formation, between freedom and virtue, between self and soul, is best lived, not debated. Act 73, and the philosophy behind it, threatens that dialogue.
By making it nearly impossible for independent schools to receive public tuition dollars, the state is not merely managing scarce resources. It is quietly asserting a single, narrow vision of what counts as real education: the horizontal encompasses all, as it must, but the vertical forever terminates in Montpelier.
Meanwhile, while we miss the larger point, a new American educational ideal for the masses is emerging from a burgeoning technocracy in Silicon Valley, a vision we might call subsistence education.
Subsistence agriculture provides just enough to survive, but never to flourish or build anew. Subsistence education works much the same way. Its purpose is to produce a serving class that does what advanced machines cannot quite yet do, and what the burgeoning technocratic leadership class does not ever want to do. Students would be trained as functionaries, not to govern; to adapt, not to judge; told what to think, not how to think.
Pope Leo XIV warned last month in his first social encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” against precisely this: an artificial-intelligence-driven economic and cognitive logic that treats human beings as inputs rather than as the purpose of technological progress.
Thus the present must justify itself: Are we preparing our children not only to find a place inside an economy dominated by technology and distant capital, but to govern themselves?
If the answer is no, then Act 73 is not just another policy dispute, but threatens what this state has long cherished as the education of citizenship.
Act 73 should be amended. Its eligibility provisions should be revised so that independent schools are not procedurally excluded from public tuition support by the state, or because they refuse to subordinate themselves completely to centralized control.
The debate over Act 73 will be remembered for what it revealed — whether Vermonters still believe that the moral formation of citizens is a public good.
